Human Traces

Sebastian Faulks received the news that his novel, A Trick of the Light, had been accepted for publication in a phone-box on Holborn Viaduct. It was in fact, the fourth novel he’d written but the first he thought worth publishing.

He worked as a journalist, first for The Telegraph, then The Independent where he remained even after the publication of his second novel The Girl at the Lion d’Or, a story about a passionate affair set against the backdrop of issues of individual and communal guilt, reparation and loss in the aftermath of WWI. The novel was widely praised with the FT calling it ‘an unusual and moving novel in which courage and abnegation are pitted against illicit but total love.’ The novel became the first in his French trilogy, succeeded by his career-defining novel Birdsong.